The history of consumer technology is littered with things that came and went. For whatever reason, consumers never really adopted the tech, and it eventually dies. Some of those concepts seem to persistently hang on, however, such as augmented reality (AR). Most recently, Apple launched its Vision Pro ‘mixed reality’ headset at an absolutely astounding price to a largely negative response and disappointing sale numbers. This impending market flop seems to now have made Meta (née Facebook) reconsider bringing a similar AR device to market.
To most, this news will come as little of a surprise, considering that Microsoft’s AR product (HoloLens) explicitly seeks out (government) niches with substantial budgets, and Google’s smart glasses have crashed and burned despite multiple market attempts. In a consumer market where virtual reality products are already desperately trying not to become another 3D display debacle, it would seem clear that amidst a lot of this sci-fi adjacent ‘cool technology,’ there are a lot of executives and marketing critters who seem to forego the basic question: ‘why would anyone use this?’
In the case of the Apple Vision Pro, the current debate is if augmented reality and spatial computing have any future at all, even as work on a Vision Pro 2 has been suspended. Meanwhile, Meta has decided to keep plugging away on its next VR headset (the predictably named Quest 4), as the VR consumer market so far is relatively healthy for a consumer product with limited mass-consumer appeal but with potential new use cases beyond games.
these hmds are kind of in fad territory. my quest2 lives in my desk most of the time. would rather see a 3d monitor tech boom frankly.
Check out the Son’s ELF-SR2 Spatial Reality Display.
Quite impressive…
If youre on a budget checkout Looking glass Portrait or looking glass go. $200-300 but much smaller than the Elf. Their 16 inch is only a little cheaper than Sony’s. If youve got $30-50K to blow they can really hook you up.
Thanks! I had not heard of it!
https://lookingglassfactory.com/looking-glass-portrait
The downside to their displays is percieved resolution. The Looking glass Portrait’s screen is 1536×2048, their optics divides that into 100 angles of display,
The sony system works differently. Where the Looking Glass can be observed by as many people as you can comfortably fit around the screen, The sony system tracks a single users eyes and adjusts the display accordingly. Since its only splitting the 3840X2160 display in two it displays a much higher resolution than the Looking Glass does.
Didn’t they do 3d monitors when the 3d tv fad was in full bloom? I mean my 3rd hand ailenware r2 17 rocking a geforce gtx970m has a few 3d monitor tags tattooed on it back from when the ps3 was hawt …
Speaking of which Sony had a ps3 tv that would do 3d or let 2 people see different screens at the same time!
Lol fads.every 10 years or so they come up with a better version of the same failed crap
Pretty sure they are referring to glasses-free 3D monitors. Asus (IIRC) just released one, but it still uses multiple cameras in combination with a Nintendo 3DS-style 3D screen, and so is far from perfect.
There are those (necessarily) boxy holographic displays that some big companies have prototyped for potential remote presence type use, but they are pretty limited so far.
The first generation of 3D screens was a lot like the first generation of VR – clunky, not very good, and prone to giving people headaches. The latest crop of glasses-free 3D screens actually is quite impressive, although, naturally, you need the right content to make the best of it – computer generated visuals, like a computer UI, or video games, which can generate the exact depth information and render the visual assets at all angles the user could see, will always be more effective for this than video footage recorded by cameras at specific angles with rough depth mapping, stitched together. It’s not like you could film a movie from every angle a viewer could see the screen at to combine using photogrammetry techniques – it just isn’t realistically implementable, and the coste would be ridiculous even if it were.
There are several niche markets for this pricey tech, but no “killer app” as of yet.
Get the cost way down and make it “blend in” and it just might become as ubiquitous as cell phones. But we are several years maybe a decade away from that.
Fiction has shown us the “killer app”.
Is it going to be more like Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” or Bruce Bethke’s “Headcrash”?
AR needs to aim for what look like a regular pair of glasses but have a camera, mic, ear buds, and the latest in transparent thin film screens on the lenses.
The transparent thin film display tech is almost ready for prime time. Once it is i think such glasses will take off.
You understand fiction is make-belive like unicorns and Santa Clause right?
No!!!! Science Fiction is what is going to be coming in the near future. Its a preview to get your mind ready. Only those gifted genetically by our Universes Creators and are quantum entangled with them can receive what they perceive our near future has for this civilization.
Fiction also shows us what can be possible. One doesn’t need to believe in unicorns or Santa to realize that fiction – and science fiction in particular – can indeed fire up the imagination.
And then, of course, there’s the famous example of Arthur C. Clarke – he was a well-known sci-fi author, in case you’re unaware – who suggested a global communication network of satellites during WWII, at a time when such a thing was firmly sharing the same realm as your unicorns and Santa.
https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/science_fiction/jenkins/jenkins_4.html
His idea was influential enough that geostationary orbit is also referred to as the Clarke Belt: https://support.esri.com/en-us/gis-dictionary/clarke-belt
Perhaps you shouldn’t be so dismissive of the role fiction can play in shaping our world.
It’s only healthy to be dismissive of science-fiction concepts when they’re touted by big companies and/or tech-bro douchebags.
Those same entities have a well-documented history of turning us into their product, so the lack of trust is deserved. That being said, ignoring the role fiction has played in shaping our technology and even our society isn’t terribly useful, either.
A lot of the things we use on a daily basis today used to only exist in fiction. You need to learn to be a little less absolutist.
Also, I wouldn’t be shocked if some nutty billionaire eventually funds the creation of a genetically engineered unicorn. Likely not in my lifetime, but…
Horse with a keratin protrusion, probably, but unicorns are supposed to have other features depending on culture involved
And that fictional killer app appears to be “it seems kinda cool in a dystopian way”
If you’ve ever used a VR headset, you probably noticed two things: (1) the games themselves offer very little over playing on a 2D screen, other than nausea and headaches; but (2) the menu screens are amazing, and by far the most enjoyable part of the experience.
I feel certain that 90s-style navigable VR worlds will never be a thing. But a 360° desktop that replaces your whole surroundings is really compelling, and if people experienced a polished version of that, I think they would spend real money to replace their existing monitors.
So I appreciate what Apple is going for, and I suspect they came very close to having a hit. They seem to understand that it has to be as convenient as putting on headphones, and that it’s the evolved form of a monitor, not a way to walk around cyberspace. But at $3,500, it’s all moot.
They could (and should) ditch the grotesque external display and the heavy glass-and-metal construction, but even then I think they’ll struggle to get it under $1k or shrink it to the size and weight of a dive mask. But if they (or someone else) could do that, I think a lot of people who tried it would want one.
“But a 360° desktop that replaces your whole surroundings is really compelling, and if people experienced a polished version of that, I think they would spend real money to replace their existing monitors.”
That was basically Vision Pro.
Turns out, it’s not really compelling (at the price point at least) over having 3 or 4 monitors. Which the sort of people who could use a 360 desktop already spent the money and had in front of them.
Don’t get me wrong – Apple did a great job on the hardware. But the utility was less than a multi monitor setup.
I really wanted them to work for being in a RV and working, but they’re hyper limited by networking issues and a bunch of apps want the license server all the time, and many don’t do well while you’re riding in a car or flying. I also found that just bungeeing a monitor to the barka lounger when you were driving was totally fine. Still waiting on simula vr but whatevs.
“(1) the games themselves offer very little over playing on a 2D screen, other than nausea and headaches”
This is why I’ve always said, from when Oculus was working on its first prototypes that were basically just a phone screen hooked to a few sensors, that this technology has one very clear market that it is perfect for: porn games. And, indeed, if you look at the the categories by volume of output worldwide, porn games are one of, if not the largest category in which VR games continue to be released. The Japanese adult gaming industry has been all over this for a while now.
I have a VR headset that exists only for Racing games and flight sims, mostly racing. I could have either spent thousands on multiple screens and a whole rig or spent less than a thousand on a good wheel setup and a quest 2. And the realism and sense of “speed” is so much better in VR. A 360 monitor would do little more than a traditional multiscreen setup for me.
The use case is there for the right games, just the games themselves are niche.
That said, outside of gaming, a VR necessary use case is hard to imagine. And an AR setup would be pointless for the “good” VR use case.
You’ve never played a flight simulator or racing simulator on a legit 6 DOF notion platform in VR I guess. There are compelling use cases, just not for the average consumer.
You obviously haven’t played many VR titles if you think VR offers very little over “2D screen” gaming. Half-life: Alyx came out in 2020 and can be considered the gold standard of all current and future VR games in terms of design and immersion. If you have played it you can tell what the difference is in VR. Some other VR titles even have a mode to remove spider enemies for the arachnophobic because of how immersive these games can be. That should indicate to you how real VR can feel to players and the value of VR.
VR users on steam are very prolific and spend a ton of money on their hardware to get optimal experiences 4090s and VR trackers are expensive. People who are into VR are VERY into it. But as they compose a very small sliver of the gaming world’s cash, they are not generally targeted by developers. Most new VR games come from small developers and suffer from miniscule budgets vs other non-VR AAA games that can gross tens of millions of units sold and hundreds of millions in sales. So in the end most games can’t compare to Alyx and its level of immersive-ness. If you look at steam user counts, out of all their users, VR users are only a very small percentage and therefore not targeted by the large game developers. Until this changes, VR will have very large hurdles to overcome if no one is making amazing experiences or ‘Killer apps’ for VR.
Has anyone here tried “display replacement” HMDs like Viture and Xreal?
It seems to me that there’s probably a much bigger market for devices that aim to replace ordinary monitors for ordinary 2D work. The current crop are mostly 1080p which limits the appeal for me, but if the next generation has 4K resolution I’m going to give it a try.
I have a Pimax 5K XR headset for racing sims like Assetto Corsa, and I can’t see the VR form-factor ever being popular as a mass-market product. Too big, too heavy, the face-seal you need for immersion makes it hot and sweaty, you can’t see your hands or keyboard, and it took a few hours of practice for me to overcome the nausea… not a lot of people are going to put up with that.
But slightly-bigger eyeglasses as a replacement for monitors? That seems like a small price to pay to have a big display everywhere. Couches, recliners, airplane seats…
The biggest problem with consumer augmented reality is that silicon valley has very little personal experience with reality. Hence the repeated images like the header where there’s zero augmentation, just VR with a transparent background.
I just want simple things: look at a book in a foreign language and have it translated in the same font; identify plants and animals; and get a quest marker when I yell out “where are my pants?” in exasperation.
All of this!
More important is noise cancelling headphones. Because I will murder people if I work in a cubicle ever again.
This is a good point. It’s easy to forget that reality is much more than just sight when thinking about AR. Noise cancelling was/is a REAL “killer app.”
i think AR is like tablet computers before the iphone,
expensive laptops with no keyboards and unresponsive restive touchscreens, unimaginative GUI
there’s been a few cracks at it,
google glass – a good, practical idea ruined by slapping an intrusive internet connected camera onto peoples faces… save that shit for gen 3 after everyone is used to seeing that shit on peoples faces FFS
expensive pass through AR, meta, ms and apple, magic leap – over promised experiences capabilities, little to no development investment, pulled the plug before anyone tried to do anything original with it (Valve went all in on VR with the lab and half life alyx, no such risk with pass through AR)
Tilt 5 have a good community, yet don’t really support devs as well as they should either in my experience, they did a lot with a sliver of the budget and frankly put big tech companies to shame.
HUD glasses like epson glasses, are pretty cool for custom applications. Voidstar labs guy chopped one up and uses it for cyborg recognition clout and a practical autocue.
the tech is cool, has untapped potential, but lacks that critical mass of investment of time, money, tech convergence, cost. It will happen all at once some day, I’m certain of it.
Make it a standard protocol
They never will, that’s not done anymore. All the money is in the “ecosystem” (some pig-huge bloated software portal to use the device, subscription services, contrived social network tie-ins, etc)
So it will fail because that stuff utterly sucks
Trusting shit on your face is a thing too, how often have you switched from dentist?
Thing is – Apple’s offering wasn’t AR. It was ‘mixed reality’, a marketing buzzword meaning ‘wear a monitor on your face and do monitor things without moving much and with more difficulty than using a monitor’.
AR has real world uses today, Apple’s Vision Pro, as great as the hardware actually was, couldn’t do AR.
It is absolutely augmented reality. It just lacks the depth and breadth that decades of AR based science fiction has given us for potential use cases because it’s still very early technology in this field.
You are incorrect. It is not Augmented reality.
The now defunct Daqri did AR. The original Meta, not facebooks meta, was AR. Lenovo’s Thinkreality A6 was AR.
When you use cameras to capture the real world and feed that image into an HMD you have MIXED reality with data.
The reduced FOV, the reduced real world resolution, and the slight delay are just some of the drawbacks of MR over AR.
What could ever go wrong when you start waving around a basebal bat in your living room with a vitual reality headset on your head.
And now go catch that picachu at the other side of the highway or in the center of that pond in the park.
VR is so much fun when you see others attempt it on youtube.
It’s exactly what I feared when the Vision Pro was release. Apple made the headset that killed VR/AR headsets because everyone else was looking how well they did before deciding whether they’d invest into any more development. Everyone saw Apple selling few headsets. And here we are. Development is going to stop. Such a shame.
Just like how Facebook murdered the concept of metaverse for the common folks by changing their name to meta while touting their own immensely impractical and milquetoast metaverse clearly designed with marketer safe sensibility in mind?
And I was thinking all the time facebook changed their name to meta because they made their money by selling metadata to the highest bidder.
That’d require them to be able to be upfront and honest in the first place.
Which is the last thing companies who threat their users as their products are capable of.
If we ever meet, the beer’s on me.
Also the fugly google doodle avatars that it forced you to create for yourself. Completely disqualifying. Nobody wants to go through such humiliation and then have some kind of virtual office meeting as their hideous virtual clones. The thought of it is enough to make you retch. These people are so completely removed from normal humanity to think there was demand for such a thing
VR is just an alternate monitor/controller setup for videogames, nothing more.
If you want your VR headset to do well, make it the best experience for playing games that are already popular.
Even the smallest headsets are too cumbersome to use, and blocking vision of the world around you is a big problem for using them for any kind of work.
AR might have some applications, but not until it becomes as small as a regular pair of glasses. Which I’m not sure is feasible, because people can’t focus that close, and adding additional lensing and mirrors and moving the display far enough away brings us back to “too bulky and cumbersome”.
Ultimately, this is all probably a novelty, like 3d TV and Stanley Cups.
Clearly one sees a diversity of special uses for HMDs, however the mixed/AR attempts to intrude on the immersive alternative realities that was virtual realities original intent, are thwarted by the complexity of trying to run two parallel universes at the same time (why?). It’s tricky and fun to play around with AR/MR but ultimately total immersion into the brave new worlds of imagination and wonder, possible in virtual reality, make owning a headset worth it and a more fulfilling Holodeck-like escape from the routines and potential stresses of a long day at work. I remember back in the glory days of amazing Amiga computing, the moment they tried to go all real-world and IBM compatible… boom, bankrupt. Same with this trend towards mixed reality… boom, just not real or affordable enough for realists who are perfectly happy in pancake rectangular 2D reality spaces. The original immersive intent of virtual reality does not need or want the distraction of reality, although, I will say advances in virtualized photogrammetry is awesome for the art of teleport travel, re: RealSee and of course, Wander and Google Earth, but those still maintain the immersive advantages of VR.
For me the killer app on the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) is the display of 3D and panoramic photography, both of which are amazing on this device. Stereoscopic photography, when done well, can be mind-blowing. But unfortunately most of what the public sees is gimmicky or so poorly done that it gives you a literal headache. Apple’s own immersive 3D films are technically excellent and well done, but while they are great demo pieces, that alone is hardly enough to justify such an expensive toy.
The best implementation of “augmented reality” would be exactly as the name implies. I imagine a regular looking pair of glasses that subtly adds, ok augments, if and only if I want it too.
Like someone mentioned above. Look at something in another language and have it translated. Maybe even have a simple piece of flat white cardboard and a book to read is projected on it. Or just a word you don’t know on a real life thing that you can stare at for 1.5 seconds (think: movie hover) and the definition will pop up. Or glance at the light switch in the corner of the room and your smart house will turn on or off the light. A subtle “follow the dotted line” projected on the road when using GPS in a car. Seamlessly.
The best example I can think of for this level of low key awesome is the yellow first down line added to TV broadcasts of NFL games.
Wearing a giant set of dumbass goggles that replaces, rather than augments, reality, was the problem.
AVP didn’t fall flat, nor was it a failure. Apple wasn’t trying to make this mainstream at this point. I’m sure Apple has sold the amount of AVPs they wanted to sell. The problem with these articles, is no one knows what target Apple was trying to meet. We had these spectators who gave wildly inaccurate estimates of what it would sell, and then ding Apple, when they don’t sell what they Apple will sell. Nor do we have any real idea of what Apple has sold.